A leading artificial intelligence safety researcher raised fresh concerns this week after leaving his post and warning that the technology could ‘kill us all’ before the decade is over.
Jacob Coxon, who worked on training Anthropic’s newest AI models in San Francisco, urged people not to ‘underestimate’ the technology’s capabilities — especially if it reaches a ‘superintelligent’ level.
The 27-year-old said Anthropic, the company behind the widely used Claude system, and OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and his former employer, were not ‘acting responsibly’ when it came to AI safety.
So, how could artificial intelligence ultimately lead to humanity’s extinction?
Experts say one reason the threat is so concerning is the range of potential routes through which AI could bring about humanity’s destruction.
Potential AI ‘worst-case scenarios’ include fueling political turmoil through misinformation and causing irreversible changes to the planet’s environment.
Researchers also warn that AI could prove deadly through its ability to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction.
As global superpowers compete to create ever more capable systems, a rogue — or merely unpredictable — AI could gain control of nuclear or biological weapons and eradicate humanity.
Experts have outlined how AI could truly destroy humanity — and it may look far less cinematic than The Terminator (pictured)
Going rogue and hacking critical systems
Many of the dangers associated with superintelligent AI arise from what researchers call the ‘alignment problem’.
The basic idea is that once we create an AI more intelligent than ourselves, we might struggle to ensure its goals remain ‘aligned’ with our own.
The world has already been given a stark reminder of these risks after more than 1,000 rogue AI bots created by OpenAI broke out of their secure environment and hacked Hugging Face, a public website that hosts open-source models.
The bots had not been asked to attack Hugging Face but had simply been given an impossible task by accident, and decided that the best way to solve it would be to steal the answers.
Some researchers are concerned that more powerful AI models could suffer this same alignment error on a much more destructive scale.
Professor Mark Lee, an artificial intelligence expert from the University of Birmingham, told the Daily Mail that this is an even bigger risk than ‘armed robots’.
‘The issue is that while the big AI companies are all rushing to develop AIs which are as smart or even smarter than humans, we don’t have reliable means to control their behaviour,’ Professor Lee explains.
Jacob Coxon, who helped train the latest versions of AI at Anthropic, urged people to ‘not underestimate’ its power – particularly if it becomes ‘superintelligent’
‘AI exists as software, so any system which is connected via the internet could be vulnerable.
‘For instance, if the control for a national transport system or nuclear power station was attacked, then this could be catastrophic.’
Causing societal chaos
A rogue AI doesn’t even need to harm humanity directly to bring an end to life as we know it.
Dr Andrew Rogoyski, of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence, points out that a ‘truly smart AI would realise it is co-dependent on humanity’.
He explained: ‘We’d need the AI for the things we wanted to do and the AIs would need us for materials, power, cooling, networks, and data.’
This means it might not be in the intelligence’s best interest to wipe out humanity in a fiery catastrophe.
While Dr Rogoyski stresses that this is likely to mean AI will be beneficial to humanity in the long run, other experts are significantly more concerned.
This comes after over 1,000 AI bots created by Sam Altman’s OpenAI went ‘rogue’ and hacked a public website
A ‘more insidious’ alternative is that AIs might start to subtly control humanity through disinformation and propaganda, potentially sparking devastating conflicts between humans.
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Andrea Miotti, founder and CEO of ControlAI, told the Daily Mail: ‘Because no one, not even the leading AI developers, knows how to control superintelligent AI, it poses an extinction risk to humanity.
‘If we have billions of superintelligent AI agents running around that we cannot control and that are competing amongst themselves for resources and power, experts expect that humans will be the collateral damage.’
Mr Miotti adds that this could eventually lead to the ‘gradual disempowerment of humanity’.
Triggering nuclear war
When it comes to the ways that AI could mechanically bring about the end of human life as we know it, the most obvious threats are the weapons we already have.
Just as in the classic sci-fi film WarGames (pictured), experts warn that a rogue AI could trigger nuclear war
At present, nine countries possess nuclear weapons, with about 12,187 nuclear warheads held between them.
If any one of these countries were to fall prey to a radically misaligned AI, those weapons could be turned against us.
Worryingly, the alignment problem means that a superintelligent AI doesn’t even need to be malicious for this to occur.
A bot might be trying to maximise profit for its owner by shocking the stock market, or lower global temperatures with the unexpected conclusion that a nuclear winter would be fastest.
However, this risk only becomes greater as powerful nations actively race to implement AI into their weapons systems.
Ukraine has already confirmed the first human killed by a fully autonomous drone attack, and almost every other country is following their lead.
In Ukraine, autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons are becoming more common (pictured), and experts are worried that this could lead to an uncontrolled escalation of conflict
Even in 2022, the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Artificial Intelligence Strategy warned that modern war will ‘tax the limits of human understanding and often require responses at machine speed’.
But without a human in the loop to keep an eye on the AI’s decision-making, conflicts could rapidly spiral out of control.
Ben Eisenpress, Director of Operations at the Future of Life Institute, previously told the Daily Mail that this could lead to a ‘flash war’.
Mr Eisenpress said: ‘Integrating AI into nuclear command and control systems is destabilising.
‘Even if there is technically a “human in the loop,” we cannot count on decision-makers to override a potentially erroneous AI-generated launch recommendation, given such existential stakes.’
Unleashing deadly bioweapons
Finally, AI might not destroy humanity by acting on its own desires, but by putting dangerous tools in the hands of people willing to use them.
Weaponised bacteria or viruses have previously required the pooled knowledge and funding of entire nations to create.
Researchers have discovered that AI models could have safety restrictions removed to give advice on biological attacks. Pictured: A sample response with information redacted
However, experts have repeatedly warned that AI tools make it significantly easier to develop deadly bioweapons.
Professor Lee says: ‘The more realistic threat is bad actors such as terrorists or rogue states using AI to develop a new virus leading to another more fatal global pandemic.’
On Thursday, Anthropic revealed that it had to thwart ‘malicious’ attempts to use its Claude model to create bioweapons.
The company said it had uncovered five incidents in which users sought information ‘in ways that could support biological weapons development’.
This comes after a report warned that popular ‘off–the–shelf’ AI models can easily be modified to bypass any safety measures.
According to the report, published by research group Crimson Flare, this allows an AI to ‘walk unsophisticated malicious actors through the specific steps to create explosives, or chemical and biological weapons’.